Lola Lafon has written a magnificent book, « Quand tu écouteras cette chanson » (When You Listen to This Song)1. After spending a night at the Anne Frank Museum, the writer produced this text of overwhelming truth — at once intimate and universal.
Plurielles:
Everyone knows Anne Frank’s Diary, one of the best-selling books in the world. Yet your book sets out to uncover an invisibilized author, an erased Jew, the tragedy and the abandonment hidden behind an eternal smile. Have the real Anne Frank, her story and her tragic end been obscured behind her fame?
Lola Lafon: Anne Frank has become a symbol, a summary of all the sorrows of the Shoah. Her diary is studied in middle schools and high schools, and that is no doubt a good thing. Everyone thinks they know her, and I thought so too — until I discovered another Anne Frank, one whom her myth had ended up eclipsing. What had happened so that a “Hollywood” version of the story would completely cover over the other? I discovered how, very quickly, it had been decided to turn Anne Frank into an icon, and I was astounded by the various adaptations of her diary.
In 1955, Broadway decided to make a play of it; her text was smoothed over, anything that might offend was erased — her own outbursts of anger, the hatred she expressed toward Nazism. The passages on Hanukkah and all references to her Jewishness were cut as well. When Anne Frank asks “why the Jewish people suffer so much,” someone saw fit to add this incredible line: “but all peoples have always suffered”!
All these manipulations made me angry, because I had the impression of witnessing the manufacture of a myth, a manufacture of images. Her father, Otto Frank, never went to see the Broadway play, for that matter.
The 1959 film2 left me even more stunned. The director, George Stevens, had to shoot a new ending after a test screening, because audiences found the film too “sad.” So a happy end was chosen, in which Anne reaffirms her “faith” in humanity, her misfortune transformed into a message of hope! And that is what remains: the smiling, trusting face of a young girl. A New York Times critic even praised the film because one came out of it “without hatred toward Nazism”!
It is true that in the 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War, the reconciliation with Germany was not to be compromised — and fundamentally, no one really wanted to hear this story.
The Hollywood version prevailed: the story had to be, in their own words, “neither too sad, nor too Jewish.”
In one of the editions of the book, Eleanor Roosevelt, no doubt with kind intent, wrote that Anne Frank “was working for peace.” But Anne Frank was not working for peace at all: she was hiding in order not to die.
“Her Diary is the work of a young girl who was the victim of a genocide, perpetrated in the absolute indifference of all those who knew. Please don’t use the word hope.” Those are the words of Laureen Nussbaum, whom I had the chance to meet for this book.
Plurielles:
Laureen Nussbaum also speaks of another invisibilization: Anne Frank was not writing a “personal diary” but a literary work.
Lola Lafon: Laureen Nussbaum was a childhood friend of Margot, Anne’s sister. She is one of the last people to have known her. She insisted right away on Anne Frank’s talent as a writer and spoke to me of her as an author rendered invisible in her work. She remembers that Anne had heard, on a clandestine radio, a minister calling on the populations of the Netherlands to preserve their writings as evidence. From then on, beginning in ’44, her diary is transformed into a book, because she is convinced that she will be published after the war.
It was a shock for me to learn that she had rewritten her text several times — a text she herself had titled Le récit de l’annexe (The Story of the Annex). I realized to what extent she had made literary choices, cutting certain passages, rewriting chapters, weaving personal reflections together with political considerations. It is truly a literary work that she conceives of as such. Yet posterity has wanted to remember only the “personal diary” of a young girl. Anne Frank wanted to become a writer, not a myth. She had a clear consciousness of her talent as well as the desire to attain it; all of that had to be given back to her, and I felt I had to begin by telling that story. Her text addresses itself to a future, to her future readers. Rereading it, I realized that it had also come looking for me.
Plurielles: You write: “How loved she is, this young Jewish girl Anne Frank — we love her all the more because we don’t know the ending.” Yet we know she is Jewish, and her ending — everyone knows it. She herself was not unaware of it.
Lola Lafon: There is no doubt a difference between knowing and looking head-on, that is, confronting that reality. Anne Frank had no choice but to understand what was happening; she looked outside, hidden behind the window curtains. She describes the roundups: “No one is spared, old people, children, babies, pregnant women, the sick — everything, everything is dragged into this journey toward death… And all of this, for the sole reason that they are Jewish.”3 And she listened to the radio. On the date of Friday, October 9, 1942, she writes: “We are well aware that these poor people will be massacred. The English radio speaks of gas chambers. It makes me sick.”
Yes it is true, we know Anne Frank’s story, her tragic end, and of course, in a certain way, we also study her because we know the ending. But few have in their memory the image of an emaciated young girl, having lost all her hair, dead of typhus, of hunger and of cold in the most complete solitude. That ending had to be silenced — just as, and the two things are no doubt linked, her Jewishness had to be blurred, erased, in order to make her the symbol of adolescence struggling against “adversity.”4 To want to set up a young Jewish girl as a universal symbol of peace says a great deal about the impossibility of acknowledging the specificity of the Shoah.
It seems to me that we ought to ask ourselves about this necessity of erasing the Jews when we speak of the universal.
Plurielles: It is perhaps a very old story…
Lola Lafon: Yes, no doubt — a story that keeps repeating itself… In a certain representation of the world, Jewish and universal are opposed, as if it were necessary to abolish oneself in order to reach others. Today I believe that this vision of the universal is a trap. In reality, one is stronger in speaking of the world’s misfortune when one brings along one’s own history. And this book also allowed me to speak of it. For it is true that for a long time, I had trouble taking it on; there was something there too heavy.
Plurielles: “Too Jewish and too sad”?
In one of your songs5, Une vie de voleuse (A Thief’s Life), you demand “a slightly lighter life,” perhaps freed from the pain of the past? In your book, you write: “Devastation, in my family, was passed down as elsewhere the color of one’s eyes is.” You also write: “my blondness was a passport to normality.”
Lola Lafon: Yes, perhaps I too found this ending “too Jewish and too sad” (it really sounds like a Jewish joke…). This too painful story — I didn’t want to be part of it, or more exactly, I couldn’t manage it.
In my adolescence, it was not easy for me to be Jewish; I long pushed away this kind of assignment. I preferred to avert my eyes, refusing any belonging I had not chosen. I didn’t want to provoke either pity or hatred — to be a little like the girls I associated with, who wore a cross. Later, I claimed an existence outside our origins, like a declaration of independence, the freedom to belong to nothing.
For me, for a long time, being Jewish meant being on the side of death, and I wanted to go on the side of life. There was, however, a first breach when, around 18, I stayed with my North American family. They had emigrated before the Shoah, and their Judaism was joyful; we sang during Shabbat. I loved this possibility of being Jewish without shame or misfortune; in fact, coming back to France, I wore a Magen David for some time.
But it took me still more time to find the strength to lean over the abyss without being swallowed by it.
Plurielles: You were active on the far left, like many Jews, but also like your grandparents and your communist parents. This engagement often coincided with a desire to escape the Jewish curse, to belong at last to others, to be “invisible” — the opposite of the so-heavy, so-hated distinction.
But antisemitism takes care of flushing out the Jews, of rendering “visible” those who no longer wished to be so, sending them back into an irremediable solitude.
Lola Lafon: Anne Frank writes: “Who has made us, the Jews, into this exception among peoples?”
I was for a long time active in libertarian milieus where I waged many battles — with the exception of those that touched me too closely and made me vulnerable. Contrary to that voluntary “erasure,” I first began by affirming a feminist identity. The collective force of women through the Me Too movement also enabled me to take it on. I believe courage is contagious, because at the same time I had decisive encounters with Jewish left-wing groups and activists like the JJR6, the Juifves VNR, the Golema collective, the RAAR7. These Jewish activists refused to keep on invisibilizing themselves and undertook to carry a strong voice on antisemitism in which I could at last recognize myself. It is no doubt a sad reality that must also be faced head-on; no awareness-raising can occur without the words of the principal parties concerned — and it is not the invisible and silent Jews who will force left-wing and antiracist milieus to look at themselves honestly. For some time now, and although timidly, this question is beginning to emerge a little. It is true that this voice came after a long silence and bitter, shared experiences which, here too, did not belong to the intimate but very much to a political and collective experience.
For my part, I was really confronted with antisemitism only once, but it was violent. One day, an activist held forth, calmly, with negationist rhetoric in front of me. My only response was to tell him I was Jewish. The others were embarrassed but no more than that — in fact, it was I who left, not him. And that is a common observation. No reactions, even though we were in milieus that reacted to everything. We wrote texts on all the world’s problems, but when the Jewish children of Toulouse were murdered, we wrote nothing. I had already demonstrated alone for Ilan Halimi, already feeling that solitude. But there, it was staggering. I went alone to the gathering, then there was the Hyper Cacher attack…
What caught up with me was, once again, this awareness of being at the crossroads of what is happening in the world and what we carry within ourselves. Like an impossibility of “looking elsewhere.”
Plurielles: With the iconization of Anne Frank, have we spent our time averting our gaze? Yet from the very beginning, Anne Frank’s diary has been the target of negationists…
Lola Lafon: The negationists have never disarmed. Quite recently, on February 10 of this year, a negationist laser message was projected onto the museum’s façade: “Anne Frank invented the ballpoint pen”8. For decades, they have cast doubt on the authenticity of the diary, talk of an invention by her father, etc. Anne Frank continues to obsess them. I also think of (even if it is very different) Qui a trahi Anne Frank ? (The Betrayal of Anne Frank), the book that explained how a Jewish notary, Arnold van den Bergh, supposedly revealed their hiding place9. After verifications, the publishing house apologized, the book was withdrawn from sale — but it had had the effect of a bombshell, in the Netherlands as elsewhere!
Plurielles: If the Jews are themselves guilty, the slate is wiped clean?
Lola Lafon: Yes, as if it were always a matter of sending signs to other negationists, messages that aim to erase, lessen or relativize. I also think of the demonstrations against the Pass sanitaire in Amsterdam, in the summer of 2021, where her portrait was brandished, with chants of: “Liberty, liberty.” Anne Frank is an icon that people enjoy trampling on.
Plurielles: Your grandmother Ida had given you a medal bearing Anne Frank’s likeness, saying: “remember.” And it is in Anne Frank’s house, that stripped-bare place, that this promise resonated. You write: “Let us bear witness to the void, without being able to escape from it; let us confront it… In the Annex, there is nothing, and that nothing, I saw it.” The absent ones, in the end, are always there?
Lola Lafon: I spent the night of August 18, 2021, at the Anne Frank Museum, in the Annex. The Annex is an empty place, and I believe that this emptiness summoned me. I first walked counting my steps, in this cramped space of 42 square meters that was shared by eight Jews in hiding, condemned to silence. I tried to imagine those hidden lives over twenty-five months — that is, seven hundred and sixty days and thousands of minutes. During that sleepless night, I realized that I was facing what, for a long time, I had wished to avoid.
Silence and absence leave traces, and I found myself confronted with them. Irremediably. As with a question we must receive without ever seeking to abolish it, or to give it a definitive answer.
For it is true that there will never be enough of the living to answer the dead. The absent ones have not disappeared, they are there, and their absence is a question that must keep on seeking us out.
Plurielles: You write: “Not to forget and not to remain stunned — how does one walk in another’s traces without erasing them?”
Lola Lafon: All survivors and their descendants inherit a kind of duty; they cannot content themselves merely with existing, they must live more strongly, for those who are gone. I dare not say in their place. The Shoah and antisemitism are an abyss; one must be able to lean over it without letting oneself be engulfed, in order to be able to keep writing about it.
Plurielles: With restraint, you evoke Pierre Goldman, your mother’s cousin.
Lola Lafon: Pierre wanted desperately to replay the resistance of his own. He was the heir to that devastation, to that unappeased anger; he was an activist everywhere, fought guerrilla wars in Latin America, sometimes lost himself. That perhaps is what it means to lean over the abyss and drown in it.
In my family, I was able to measure the impasse that wanting to relive what our parents and grandparents had done represents — as though to repair or avenge, at the risk of erasing, what had taken place. But in fact, it is impossible. I belong to the third generation after the Shoah; we need to think about what we make of this inheritance. For my part, it seemed to me that I had to give Anne Frank back to herself, without fully walking in her footsteps. That is no doubt why I did not enter her room — I wanted to restore her truth to her, perhaps a little of her life.
Plurielles: You write: “To look head-on at what will never be filled in.” René Char wrote that lucidity was “the wound closest to the sun.” Can one understand the success — but also the emotion — that your book provokes, in light of this unveiling? As a consent to the light, even to the burn?
Lola Lafon: The success of my book astonishes me; I have gone to dozens of cities in France. There is no typical reader profile, and that is precisely what touches me. The encounters are each time great moments of sharing. People come from everywhere, and what moves me above all is the mingling of generations. At book signings, I see grandmothers with their grandsons, but also young people who have brought along their parents — as if this book, far beyond the Jewish community, was part of a transmission. There is no equivalent to the Shoah, but the question of exile, of silences in the place of transmission, of the pain of confronting one’s history are, I believe, common to many of us. That is what descendants of Algerian workers, of Italian refugees, etc., sometimes tell me, adding: “I don’t have your story at all,” all the while identifying with this account. There is perhaps a shared truth in paying homage to one’s own and to others.
Plurielles: There is this idea, today widely shared, that we have made too much of the Shoah, that it is time to close the chapter. The reception of your book is a stinging refutation of it.
Lola Lafon: When you write a book, you always wonder whether people will follow you. When I chose the Anne Frank Museum, I immediately thought of that nagging little refrain: “another book on the Shoah?” And then I realized that we really are not done with this story. That perhaps, for many of us, we hadn’t even begun. It seemed to me that the statufication of Anne Frank had also functioned as a way to “get rid” of this story. Like a clearing of all accounts. Anne Frank — everyone has read her, many have forgotten her; she appears a little like the expiatory figure of a crime that everyone would like to ignore. I think back to that so-apt sentence in Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski10: “The extermination of the Jews of Europe is not a crime against humanity, it is a crime committed by humanity.” No, the chapter will never be closed; we cannot and we must not close it. We must accept gathering these traces, these absences, listening to these silences. A little like in the Cambodian director Rithy Panh’s beautiful film, L’image manquante (The Missing Picture)11. That picture, which he does not find, must continue to be missing to us.
Interview conducted by Brigitte Stora
« Quand tu écouteras cette chanson », Lola Lafon, Éditions Stock, published 17/08/2022, in the “Ma nuit au Musée” collection, which invites authors to spend a night in a museum of their choosing.↩︎
Audrey Hepburn had refused the role, not feeling legitimate to embody her on screen because her mother had revered Hitler.↩︎
Page 77 of the 2019 edition.↩︎
As stated on a back cover.↩︎
Lola Lafon is also a singer and composer.↩︎
Juifs et Juives Révolutionnaires (Revolutionary Jews).↩︎
Réseau d’Action contre l’Antisémitisme et tous les Racismes (Action Network against Antisemitism and All Racisms).↩︎
This message refers to sheets written in pen that a researcher found in the 1960s among Anne Frank’s papers. This element has regularly fueled the conspiracy theory of a fake diary.↩︎
Qui a trahi Anne Frank ? (The Betrayal of Anne Frank), by Rosemary Sullivan, explains how the Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh supposedly revealed Anne Frank’s hiding place in 1944 in Amsterdam. According to the experts’ report, the investigation was based solely on hypotheses and erroneous interpretations of sources.↩︎
Jan Karski, by Yannick Haenel, published on September 3, 2009 by Gallimard.↩︎
Rithy Panh, L’image manquante (The Missing Picture), released in 2013, is a poetic film in which archival images alternate with clay figurines, like an endless quest about the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.↩︎